2 ms·

Uhm, what? The alternative is to have a few million people that you're concerned about for some reason and then have no way to exclude the vast majority of them

Uhm, what? The alternative is to have a few million people that you're concerned about for some reason and then have no way to exclude the vast majority of them from investigative interest. The test is useful, just not useful enough to transform a random population into a list of suspects. It's useful for what the FBI says it's getting used for - determining how to allocate resources among a limited population that's already under suspicion. Eg, be more likely to assign an active agent if the case involves people with access to weapons.

jacquesm 10y ago
> The alternative is to have a few million people that you're concerned about for some reason and then have no way to exclude the vast majority of them from investigative interest. If you're concerned about a few million people to spot 10 (a high estimate) per year then you will need better tools than dragnet surveillance and questionnaires like these. Did you really expect to answer any of these questions about a would-be terrorist in such a way that it would help an investigation? Check the questions, it's positively skewed towards one particular kind of terrorist (young Islamic males even though it does not state that outright it might as well be written there). And then you get your nice, upstanding Christian white-guy who murders 6 people in cold blood and would have murdered a whole lot more if he had the chance. These questions are meaningless without accurate priors and accurate priors require incidence rates that are distinguishable from noise.